Beyond Permissibility: Human Dignity and Intergenerational Justice in Islamic Bioethical Governance of Heritable Gene Editing and Embryo Selection
Keywords:
Islamic bioethics, human genome editing, embryo selection, human dignity, intergenerational justiceAbstract
Rapid developments in heritable genome editing and embryo selection have intensified ethical debates concerning therapeutic intervention, reproductive choice, human dignity, lineage, and responsibility toward future generations. This study examines how Islamic bioethics can govern these technologies beyond a narrow permissibility-based approach. It aims to analyze the construction of human dignity in Islamic bioethical discourse, compare Islamic ethical principles with international biomedical governance, and develop an integrated framework for evaluating reproductive genomic technologies. The study employs qualitative comparative normative document analysis of Islamic jurisprudential resolutions, international bioethical declarations and guidelines, regulatory documents, and relevant biomedical studies. The findings show that therapeutic genome editing may be ethically justified only when its clinical benefits remain proportionate to the risks and burdens of the entire treatment pathway. The analysis also demonstrates that the distinction between therapy and enhancement becomes unstable in embryo selection, particularly when testing shifts from severe monogenic disorders to probabilistic disease ranking and non-medical traits. Human dignity is therefore reconstructed through ontological, relational, institutional, and intergenerational dimensions. Based on these findings, the article proposes a dignity-based Islamic governance framework integrating therapeutic purpose, scientific validity, proportionality, lineage integrity, reproductive agency, intergenerational responsibility, and distributive justice. The study contributes theoretically by repositioning Islamic bioethics as a continuous, multidisciplinary, and evidence-responsive system of governance rather than a reactive mechanism for classifying emerging technologies as permissible or prohibited.
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